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The Marquise of O and Other Stories
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audience is of course aware all along) and her husband’s acquiescence in the prospect of becoming the putative father of Hercules as his reward for having unwittingly conceded the
jus primae noctis
to Jupiter; but Kleist also emphasizes Alcmene’s confusion and anguish and subtly exploits the theme’s serious potential. His procedure in
The Marquise of O
— is essentially similar. What has happened? During the storming by Russian forces of a citadel commanded by the heroine’s father, she has fallen into the hands of some ruffianly enemy troops who attempt to rape her; she is rescued from them by the young Russian officer Count F—, but he himself, in the heat of battle, yields to the sudden temptation offered by her fainting-fit. Kleist at first withholds this last fact from the reader by teasingly inserting a dash into the middle of a sentence, but we are almost at once supplied with two clues to it: the Count’s unexplained embarrassment when asked to identify the would-be perpetrators of the outrage, and secondly his cry, as he falls apparently mortally wounded in another battle, of ‘Giulietta, this bullet avenges you’ – using what we are told is the Marquise’s first name. The narrative presently refers to her unaccountable symptoms of early pregnancy, and then immediately to F—’s extraordinary first visit to her family’s house, when with inexplicable insistence he urged her to marry him at once: inexplicable, that is, to the Marquise and her relatives, but the reader by now at the latest sharesthe Count’s and the narrator’s knowledge of the true facts. If the slowness of everyone else to grasp them, and the extraordinary consternation and fuss that follow their eventual disclosure, seem excessive to the present-day reader, he must bear in mind the standards and prejudices of North German aristocratic families such as Kleist’s own – the code by which what this gentleman has done to this lady is not only unspeakable but literally unthinkable. What is not wholly clear is whether, and if so to what extent, Kleist consciously intended to put the melodramatic behaviour of Giulietta and her family in an ironic, parodistic light. If he did not, then the story does not really come off as a work of art; if he did, then it has a subtlety comparable with that of
Amphitryon
. In either case, however, it is a text of considerable psychological interest. One curious feature is Kleist’s depiction of the extreme rage of the father at his daughter’s supposed fall from virtue, and the more or less explicitly incestuous element in the scene of their reconciliation. The motif of a father’s jealous and protective love for his daughter and her passionate devotion to him, brought into currency by Rousseau’s
La Nouvelle Héloïse
, was in Kleist’s time a literary topos in German drama (cf. Lessing’s
Emilia Galotti
, Lenz’s
The Soldiers
, H. L. Wagner’s
The Infanticide
, Schiller’s
Luise Miller
; post-Kleistian parallels are Hebbel’s
Maria Magdalena
and Hauptmann’s
Rosa Berndt
). In
The Marquise of O
— Kleist accentuates this commonplace theme, parodistically perhaps, to a point verging on the grotesque. Then there is Giulietta’s dramatic polarization of her lover or assailant into ‘angel’ and ‘devil’; this too might be dismissed as a literary cliché, but it seems to be something more. Giulietta’s whole relationship to the Count is an enigma to her, which she can only gradually resolve. The Count himself is enigmatic, with a dark and irrational streak in his nature. He rescues Giulietta from his troops, only to use her himself a moment later as a prize of war – we are reminded of the paradoxical association oflove and violence in
Penthesilea
. Above all, Count F— carries with him, as we learn in what is certainly the oddest passage in the story (p. 82 ), a
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